I like making things. I took a “Design Thinking” class at Willamette this semester, and my project has leapt from school project into the domain of making real things.
Very basically, the app is a system to facilitate chore-doing for off-campus college-age households. There are other apps and systems that attempt to do this, but ours is the exception because the specific question we ask is itself exceptional: Whereas other systems ask, “How can we get each person to do his/her chores?” we ask, “How can we keep the house clean?” This is advantageous because the absolute goal is to never ask anybody to do anything—it’s entirely incentive based (and so far, it works!).
The paper prototypes have been very successful, and I’m in the process of creating the final conceptional design. After this, I will do a technical write up for the engineers, and then research and develop a good UI, do some wire-framing, and eventually research marketing. I’m very lucky to have had some of my best friends graduate from Berkeley as software engineers, and they are very excited about this project. Currently, they are working on the back-end for the first “real” version.
We are excited about this project because it’s our first that feels to have some real potential. We’ve had several other crazy ideas in the past, but they never really worked out. This time, though, we really have the means to make this real, and to make it good. And, if nobody wants it, at least we want it for ourselves and will have learned a ton from the process of creating it.
It’s just a hobby because my team members are very busy, as I hope to be this summer. This is the sort of project one does instead of watching a movie in the evening.
Very basically, the app is a system to facilitate chore-doing for off-campus college-age households. There are other apps and systems that attempt to do this, but ours is the exception because the specific question we ask is itself exceptional: Whereas other systems ask, “How can we get each person to do his/her chores?” we ask, “How can we keep the house clean?” This is advantageous because the absolute goal is to never ask anybody to do anything—it’s entirely incentive based (and so far, it works!).
The paper prototypes have been very successful, and I’m in the process of creating the final conceptional design. After this, I will do a technical write up for the engineers, and then research and develop a good UI, do some wire-framing, and eventually research marketing. I’m very lucky to have had some of my best friends graduate from Berkeley as software engineers, and they are very excited about this project. Currently, they are working on the back-end for the first “real” version.
We are excited about this project because it’s our first that feels to have some real potential. We’ve had several other crazy ideas in the past, but they never really worked out. This time, though, we really have the means to make this real, and to make it good. And, if nobody wants it, at least we want it for ourselves and will have learned a ton from the process of creating it.
It’s just a hobby because my team members are very busy, as I hope to be this summer. This is the sort of project one does instead of watching a movie in the evening.